Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media.
By Khandis R. Blake, Brock Bastian, Thomas F. Denson, Pauline Grosjean, and Robert C. Brooks.
"Female sexualization is increasing, and scholars are divided on whether this trend reflects a form of gendered oppression or an expression of female competitiveness. Here, we proxy local status competition with income inequality, showing that female sexualization and physical appearance enhancement are most prevalent in environments that are economically unequal. We found no association with gender oppression. Exploratory analyses show that the association between economic inequality and sexualization is stronger in developed nations. Our findings have important implications: Sexualization manifests in response to economic conditions but does not covary with female subordination. These results raise the possibility that sexualization may be a marker of social climbing among women that track the degree of status competition in the local environment."
"The notion that sexualization manifests in response to gender oppression is the dominant sociopsychological framework for understanding the prevalence of sexualization across cultures. Contrary to simple predictions that sexualization reflects female subordination, however, stands the observation that the rise in sexualization over the last half century has occurred during a period of falling gender inequality"
"Publicly displayed, sexualized depictions of women have proliferated, enabled by new communication technologies, including the internet and mobile devices. These depictions are often claimed to be outcomes of a culture of gender inequality and female oppression, but, paradoxically, recent rises in sexualization are most notable in societies that have made strong progress toward gender parity. Few empirical tests of the relation between gender inequality and sexualization exist, and there are even fewer tests of alternative hypotheses."
"Our results do not support the prediction that female sexualization and appearance management arise most often in gender-oppressive environments, especially once income inequality and confounders are accounted for. Likewise, we find no consistent evidence for the prediction that an increased cultural emphasis on beauty arises from women’s progress toward gender parity. These findings highlight that the influence of gender oppression on the prevalence of female sexualization and appearance enhancement has been overstated, especially within developed economies."
"Why do income inequality and sexualization co-occur? In addition to income inequality breeding status competition, we suggest that it strengthens incentives operating in the sexual marketplace. Physical attractiveness enhances a woman’s value as a mate and is thus an area of female–female competition. For men, however, higher income enhances quality as a prospective mate, and income inequality corresponds with variation in the quality of male mates available. In nonhuman animal species, intrasexually competitive behavior among females increases when male mate quality is highly variable. Conditions in which some men possess a disproportionate share of the wealth may thus incentivize women to sexualize and enhance their physical appearance to out-do their fellow competitors and attract the highest-quality men available at the top of the income distribution. (A recently accepted paper shows convergent evidence: Negative economic shocks narrow the pool of suitable men, thus intensifying mating competition among women by increasing the share of unwed women and mothers."
Found via New Models website.